In a recent post on Mastodon I expressed my frustration that user interfaces Apple engineers build with SwiftUI tend to be so bad, they could be from a very old Windows version.

This new user interface is garbage. It gets worse when you realize that this had to be implemented by a person working on Xcode. This poor person had to build a user interface that is clearly designed for a bad toy software into a software they have to use every day.

So I assumed the reason has to be that it’s easier to build bad user interfaces in SwiftUI on the Mac. To proof me wrong I build the Behavior settings user interface from Xcode 16 myself using SwiftUI.

It turned out, I indeed was wrong.
Kind of.

It is very easy to build the user interface from Xcode 16 using SwiftUI. Even a person like me, who hates and avoids SwiftUI with a passion can build a usable user interface with it.

(I ignored data handling and there is a bug that the selection of the table on the left side isn’t shown, but apart from that, this seems to work.)

My experiment for a usable Behaviors setting build with SwiftUI.

So the question is, why did Apple choose to build such a horrible user interface?

The Behavior setting in Xcode 26..

What do you think?

Let me know on Mastodon.

Apple, if you need that code, my DM are open. ;)

(No AI was used to write this post.)